Controlling the narrative is beneficial if you are to win in a market that constitutes not just you, but other competing brands. For this to happen, you must be aware of the sentiments of customers so as to navigate things in your favor. Another thing is to do sentiment analysis to check any feedback regarding your brand or product.
Therefore, analyzing sentiments (opinions) that have to do with your brand is one of the major factors that positions you at the forefront of your industry and most especially, in the mind of your customers.
So, in this blog post, we will be discussing sentiment analysis advantages, the appropriate guide to sentiment analysis in customer care, and why customer sentiment analysis matters. But before that, let’s understand what sentiment analysis is in social media as that’s the largest marketing forum.
Understanding Sentiment Analysis in Social Media Monitoring
Sentiment analysis is the identification of the tone behind a body of text; it’s the study of the reaction or motive behind the voice of a customer. It could be through text, voice notes, phone calls, etc. Knowing the expression of the customer makes you know how to react and what to do next.
Social media sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, is very important because it informs you of how your audience perceives your brand, product, customer relationship, etc. Maximizing the chances gotten from this goldmine (social media) is therefore important. The beauty of this is that all this information is obtained for free and they are very instrumental to your business’ success.
A few years back, getting customers’ sentiments was quite difficult. You’ll most likely have to spend some amount of money to gather your audience’s perception about developments in your business. But thanks to social media such as blogs and social networks, you can get your audience’s opinions and emotions with little to no cost.
Today
With the advent of social media, online sentiments have become a type of virtual currency for businesses that want to advertise their products, uncover new prospects, and manage their reputation. Many firms are turning to sentiment analysis to help them automate the process of filtering out the noise, interpreting discussions, selecting relevant content, and acting on the information gathered accordingly.
The advantages of sentiment analysis design if properly done are limitless. Using sentiment analysis tools is essential. This is so because sentiment analysis tools are intra-rater reliable i.e., they give consistent true and fair results across various samples. Whereas a human tends to be judgemental while accessing different customer reactions, and sometimes, compares different people’s reactions. This shouldn’t be because each customer is a distinct personality, so they should be attended to differently.
However, a mix of both is advisable as the errors made by humans won’t be made by sentiment analysis tools and vice versa.
The Importance of Social Media Sentiment Analysis
All brands will like to have their names trending on social media, but while they want it, they don’t want it to be for bad reasons. It’s notable to mention that social media is a two-edged sword – sometimes, it’s beneficial and sometimes, you’d wish it never existed.
Therefore, having a lot of mentions, views, likes, comments, and shares to post on your business social media account isn’t all that is needed, rather it’s how you utilize the data shared by your audience. It involves gathering and analyzing the data shared by your audience. This will help you make better decisions.
Below are some of the advantages of social media sentiment analysis:
Better Understanding of Your Audience
The first benefit you will get from utilizing the sentiment analysis concept on social media is an improved understanding of your customers. Through collecting, examining, and analyzing customers’ opinions, you will know how your audience feels about your brand, your social posts, your customer care, the speed at which you respond to complaints, and your campaigns.
Social media sentiment analysis does not just tell you how many times you’re mentioned but makes obvious all the necessary information needed to know how your brand is perceived and the competitive advantage you have.
Improve Customer Care Experience
The data gotten from customers notify your service and support team of any shortcomings that the organization should be aware of. Your organization will then design an appropriate response, plan, or script. While doing this assessment, you might even get to find out about more products that are affected by the same complaint or have different issues that need swift adjustment.
Customer sentiment analysis using customer service feedback can be incredibly beneficial to your business. It elucidates why and how customers experience bad emotions, as well as removing all aspects that contribute to unfavorable experiences.
Also, keeping an eye out for unfavorable social mentions allows your team to reach out to customers who have had a bad experience with your company. In many cases, a simple answer or follow-up can go a long way toward resolving a customer issue. A plus to this is that customers who benefit from follow-up tend to become die-hard fans who in fact, say good things about your brand to people. This is because they’ve enjoyed a first-hand customer care relationship.
Identify Your Market Position
Market position means how you are being perceived in relation to your competitors. A brand cannot be everything to everyone. Customers prefer a brand to another based on distinct purposes and it’s very essential that as a business, you identify what your brand stands for.
Monitoring social media sentiments will assist you in determining your position in your industry. As a result, you’ll be able to reach the appropriate people with the right messages at the right time. Also, it helps you in performing a SWOT analysis. You will learn about your strengths and opportunities, not forgetting to improve on your weaknesses and threats.
You can use customers’ feedback on your competitors’ products to fine-tune your own product launch. It assists you in obtaining customers’ opinion analytics in order to improve the results of your marketing campaigns.
These sentiments will also help you know where you really excel and the sections of your brand calling for improvement. An example is when a car company is praised for its car designs but criticized at the same time for the car cost.
With this knowledge, the company could help to mitigate the maintenance cost and so doing, excelling in all aspects, or the company could choose to continue to focus on the design of her cars, thereby becoming the best in that area.
Refined Brand Messages
Over time as you monitor social media sentiments, you’ll begin to see how your messages affect how your followers perceive you. You’ll easily discover more about what your audience wants by following trends and looking into positive or negative sentiments. This will, in turn, help you refine your next set of messages to suit their liking.
You might even learn something new that will help you improve your overall brand messages and strategy. Alternatively, it will assist you in determining how actions you made offline are resonating in the social media space. For example, you can brief your audience about an action you took and ask for their opinion on how they will want the next set of actions to be.
Early Detection of Brand Problems
Another benefit of social media sentiment analysis is brand monitoring, which can assist you in better management of your brand reputation. Sentiment analysis of your brand mentions on social media, product reviews, forums, and other places, for example, can help you immediately halt negative PR from spiraling out of control.
You never want your business to be in a bad spot. However, if this occurs, monitoring social media sentiment can assist you in detecting the problem at an early stage. You can quickly come up with a problem response plan to either reduce or eliminate the issue.
In addition, with the use of social media sentiment analysis tools like Socialays, you will be immediately informed when there are changes in the pattern of things. If done manually, there’s a chance that you’d not be aware when things changed as you won’t be online at all times. But with a sentiment analysis tool, you’d get notifications at all times and that will make sure that you are on top of changes in what your customers expect from your business.
Your Guide to Sentiment Analysis in Customer Care
Sentiment analysis is a method of recognizing emotion in written content. In doing this, it’s best to use an Artificial Intelligence (AI) like Socialays that auto-categorizes on social media comments in several ways for easier decision-making. The AI reads the whole body of comments in seconds and;
- classifies them based on their polarity, which shows if an emotion is positive, negative, or neutral
- classifies them based on their magnitude, which reveals how strong customers’ emotions are. The 9 categories include hate, happiness, sadness, neutral, worry, fun, love, relief, and surprise
- detects “questions” and “spam” content
It is important to gather all relevant information before you start analyzing. Below are several ways you can use to gather customers’ sentiments.
Getting Customer’s Sentiments through Live Chat
Live chat is a gold mine of information. One can gather live feedback from customers that are timely and relevant. This is particularly useful if the company just recently launched a product or service. You can also use this means when you want to interact with your customers on a personal level.
Getting Customer Feedback through Chatbots
In recent years, chatbots have gained popularity as a frontline service tool. This is due to the fact that chatbots have become more intelligent and human-like over time. Chatbots can now converse with customers in a natural and humanized manner. Another beauty of this tool is that it works even when you’re not available to attend to customers; the human nature of the tool is always on point.
Getting Customer’s Sentiments through Online Surveys
The majority of the world now has internet capability and this trend is not going away. This has made online surveys the best and cheapest form of all survey methods. Through this means, you can gather extensive data about customers’ experiences with your business, products, and services. All you have to do is to prepare cogent questions whose answers will be instrumental to your business growth.
Getting Customers’ Opinions from Social Media
You can use social media to generate significant customer data for sentiment analysis. Customers are more outspoken in their social media and thus are a rich source of information. Therefore, it’s essential that you build a social media presence for your business if you want to sink deep into the minds of your customers.
Another valuable resource is the comment section of your blog or website. Customers sometimes leave feedback for you there.
Gathering Customers Sentiments from Product Reviews and Ratings
Product reviews and ratings are available on a variety of social platforms, including Google Play, Amazon, and others. Such reviews and ratings are a goldmine for you in terms of gathering data and analyzing customers’ sentiments.
When you introduce new products and services to the market, you will receive feedback in the form of reviews and ratings. Collate this data and utilize it to analyze customers’ sentiment. Also, you can gather competitors’ reviews from online platforms like Amazon, Google, and Google Play, and then, put them through your customer sentiment analysis model to see what worked for them and what didn’t.
Getting Customer’s Feedback from Personal Connection
A one-on-one interview with your customers is one of the most effective methods to gather data. Communicating directly with your customers can provide intimate feedback crucial to your business’ success. You get to ask the correct questions and gather a lot of data. You can use your one-on-one with your customer to start your customer sentiment analysis designs.
Requirements for a Successful Analysis in Customer Care
For your sentiment analysis to be accurate and successful, do the following:
- To get the most accurate information on consumers’ opinions, ask for feedback on as many touchpoints as necessary. At the end of each data gathering model, try to get accurate and timely feedback.
- This feedback can be used to categorize customers as either “promoters,” “passives,” or “opposers.” Promoters are the most coveted, loyal customers who considerably increase your business’ value. Passives are neutral customers. Opposers, on the other hand, are your audience that doesn’t say well about your brand.
- When these feedbacks are loaded, you can see which scenarios result in a pleasant customer experience.
- Based on the sentiment analysis data, make changes to your products, features, or services. Provide more of the desirable variables that led to the positive customer experience while entirely eliminating the unfavorable ones.
Customer Sentiment Analysis – Why it Matters?
Why does customer sentiment matter? Below are just some reasons why and how to go about it.
Management of a Brand’s Image
Customers use the internet to discuss brands, products, and services, as well as share their experiences and recommendations. Regular monitoring of customers’ sentiments can be used to the business’ advantage. Examples include checking out shared opinions or comments, product reviews, blogs, and discussion forums.
Through customer sentiment analysis, you can determine a brand’s image and what to do to satisfy your customers. For PR professionals, brand monitoring is a crucial part of the business. Sentiment analysis should be one of their go-to tools. Therefore, if you want your brand to maintain its image, you must analyze your customers’ sentiments.
Market Research
Customers’ sentiment analysis provides a large amount of data, making it a valuable supplement to any market research project. Whether you are looking at an entire market or just your niche, analyzing customers’ opinions offers a wealth of information.
All of this information allows you to conduct more focused market research, which ensures making better decisions.
Final Thoughts
The advantages of sentiment analysis cannot be overemphasized. For any business that wants to be successful, prioritizing customers’ needs is essential.
Customers speak more freely on social media. In fact, they say things that businesses sometimes don’t know about their products or services. This makes social media a warehouse of resources for all brands. To make good use of this avenue, firstly build a social media presence for your brand. Educate your audience about the best use of your products and services, and inform them of recent developments.
After that, gather opinions, complaints, accolades, and comparisons, and analyze them to see how you can do better. As the popular saying goes, “Customers are always right.” Listen to your customers to grow your business.
